Our specific aim is to develop an objective measure of reflective sociomoral thought by engaging in an extensive psychometric construction and validation program. The proposed objective test will be based upon recent methodological advances in the field, and will fill certain gaps left by existing instrumentation. Specifically, there is currently a widespread need among researchers interested in the Kohlberg-type study of sociomoral development for a recognition-task measure that has high concurrent validity with Kohlberg's production-based measure of moral judgement. The proposed Sociomoral Reflection Objective Measure will represent an application of the instructional procedure innovated in Page and Bode's Ethical Reasoning Inventory to selected stage-significant items derived from Gibbs, Widaman, and Colby's Sociomoral Reflection Measure. The significance and importance of a successfully standardized and validated SROM would be considerable since, as Brown and Herrnstein note, moral development is "a very substantial aspect of human psychology." A group-administerable and computer-scorable measure of reflective sociomoral thought could play a major role in facilitating research in a wide variety of areas bearing on sociomoral development, such as mental health, socialization, moral education, delinquency, correctional programs, individual differences, and judgment-action relationships.